Derek Massey

I have continuously been intrigued by a blog post penned by the inimitable Seth Godin in January of this year. In that post called "Time to start a newspaper", he suggests that real estate brokers ...wait for it..... start a local newspaper.

Last night I witnessed a variation on this theme: Some local real estate professionals (myself included) help to break a story that we couldn't get any information about from the "real" news sources. Maybe not "break," but at least inform others as to what was going on.

It all started about 8:30 last night when I noticed helicopters flying around my rather rural neighborhood and shining lights in people's backyards (mine included). "Rural" might be an understatement. Where I live, police helicopters don't just start flashing lights on people's houses - ever. This was exciting stuff!

Here's the timeline:

8:43 PM: I simply tweet "Helicopters circling my neighborhood. What gives? Did some cows have a gang fight?" (I know, hilarious. You didn't know you were getting a comedy routine when you started reading this, did you?) I follow that up with a tweet giving more information provided from a Baltimore County Police Department phone call.

At 9:19 PM, local real estate agent Zach Hosford provides more detail here, telling us the exact neighborhood where the suspect lives and fleed from.

At 9:44, I get an email from a neighbor who has a police scanner. I post portions of that email to Posterous here.

At 11:06, Zach closed the story via Twitter by letting us all know, "he's apprehended everyone sleep tight!"

It started with a simple tweet, and within a few hours the story ended with the news that an armed suspect was taken into custody. All broadcast in the public space. I suppose anyone has the ability to do this, but aren't real estate agents who are armed with strong local networks and the ability to get and disseminate information superbly able to?

Photo credit: sskennel

Confession time: I came late to the recycling game. We bought our first house in 2003 in a town where there was no curbside pickup for either trash or recycling, yet the transfer station made it very easy to drop off each. Despite this ease of use, we only "dabbled" in the art of separation. Sure, if we had a party and needed to dispose of excess cans, bottles or boxes, we'd recycle. But it never became part of the "plan."

That changed in 2006. My brother-in-law and sister-in-law moved in with us for a summer on the heels of a relocation to NH from VT. Said brother-in-law (Jarrett Duncan, now an Associate in the Administrative Law department of a prestigious NH law firm) had been on us for a while about recycling. Finally, fed up with seeing mountains of recycleables hauled off to the dump, Jarrett helped us put a plan in place. We bought some containers, and religiously separated the castaway wheat from the chaff.

So what's the big revelation?

Fast-forward 3+ years. Yesterday we forgot to bring out the recycling. In the hustle and bustle of Sunday-night week prep, we both forgot. Since we've had more than a few people over the last couple of weeks, the recycling was a little heavier than usual. So we started brainstorming about what to do. Where can we bring it? Where is the recycling station? Do we need a sticker on our car? What are the hours?

It never occurred to us to just throw it away.

Baltimore County offers curbside recycling pickup on Monday, trash on Wednesday. It would be easy to throw it away on Wednesday with the rest of the trash. Yet it never it occurred to us to do that (until someone at work casually mentioned that as an option). It still doesn't register as a solution. Three years ago we would have just tossed it, and today we're deliberating how to get it to the right place. I'd say that's just a little bit of progress...

Photo Credit: Chris Satchwell